Here's Amazon's political action committee giving the maximum donation to Bruce Poliquin, Republican congressman in Maine's second district, and among the top recipients of NRA donations in the House. Poliquin has cashed over $200K of NRA checks in his career.

The Great Slate has supported Poliquin's opponent, @golden4congress, a former Marine and assistant minority leader in the Maine House who is running at a terrific financial disadvantage to Poliquin, but has a chance to win in November if we can fund him. secure.actblue.com/donate/great_s…

If you work at Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Microsoft, know that your labor is being used to fund large donations to Republicans like Poliquin, Cruz, Nunes, Scalise and worse. Have a look at donationsfrom.tech for some good examples. Make a ruckus to your CEO!

Here's Amazon giving $1K to Republican Ken Buck (running against the Great Slate's @McCormickForCO). Buck once refused to prosecute a rape case where he had an audio confession because he thought the jury would see it as a case of "buyer's remorse". Thanks, Amazon!

Excited for @Axne4Congress to win in her pivotal swing district in Iowa? Here's Amazon maxing out to her Republican opponent:

And here's Google doing the same. David Young, who voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gets a nice fat donation from Google PAC:

Here's Jim Jordan, deeply implicated in a sexual abuse scandal at Ohio State, getting the maximum allowable donation from Google in late May.

Here's Twitter donating to Republican Elise Stefanik, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and voted to quash the investigation into Russian interference. This is one of only two donations Twitter made in April. Who at Twitter thought having a PAC was a good idea?

Here's facebook giving to Ohio Congressman Bill Johnson, who in a public hearing called the Environmental Protection Agency "un-American".

Here's Facebook giving money to Devin Nunes on June 29. Facebook makes a fetish of being politically neutral, but its top executives are paying to get Devin Nunes re-elected in the company's name. 🤔

And these are just the obvious direct donations. All of these companies also fund other PACs, which allow them to funnel more money to Republican candidates while obscuring the trail. Microsoft gave a huge donation to Roy Moore this way, for example. Reporters should dig in more!

I wonder how it feels for @JanzforCongress to buy Facebook ads knowing the company PAC is actively bankrolling his opponent, Devin Nunes. Facebook and Twitter should immediately shut down their political action committees.

I can't overstate how full of interest recent tech industry political giving is for any reporter willing to spend a few hours with FEC filings. The flow of money is mostly obfuscated through intermediary PACs (similar to how shell companies work) but it rewards patient study!

The real hero in all this is the excellent FEC website. Go to fec.gov -> campaign finance data -> filings and reports -> PAC and party committee reports and use the filter box to search for your employer, to find out what your backbreaking office labor is funding.

What has two thumbs, once gave a speech at a white supremacist convention run by an organization founded by David Duke, and got a huge donation from Salesforce PAC? This guy!

And here's Google maxing out last year to Steve Scalise, who like I said upthread once gave a speech at a white supremacist convention run by an organization founded by David Duke. I know I beat up on Google, but I can't imagine this accurately represents their values.

If you're wondering why I don't pick on Apple's political donations, it's because they don't have a PAC. The other tech companies could (and should!) shut theirs down tomorrow with zero impact on their business interests. There is no defense for this legal form of bribery.

Wikipedia: "In December 2017 [...] Gregg Harper supported a review of overhauling the Congressional Accountability Act which makes it harder for victims of sexual harassment to come forward with allegations than victims in the private sector." Facebook gave his campaign $1000.

That same month, Facebook gave $5000 to Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, who has repeatedly introduced legislation to overturn Roe vs. Wade, was the only senator of 99 to vote against an amendment saying "climate change is real and not a hoax", and has an A+ rating from the NRA

And of course, Facebook has donated to Steve Scalise, who once famously spoke at a white power rally.

Here's Facebook donating to Tim Murphy, the pro-life congressman who famously pressured his lover to get an abortion, and in whose office harrassment was rampant. Murphy would resign just a few months after this March 2017 donation.

On February 7, 2017, Senator Steve Daines blocked Elizabeth Warren from reading a letter from Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor, as its factual content was offensive to Jeff Sessions. Six weeks later, Facebook gave Daines's campaign $2500.

So who is making these political decisions? It's not the donors—typically high-level executives pay into a company PAC automatically, and if you look at personal political donations from people like Sheryl Sandberg or @boztank, none of them go to people like Scalise or Nunes.

Employees at Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others deserve an explanation for why money is being given in their name to help re-elect some of the worst people in government.

Here's Salesforce (which only very recently started political giving) donating to re-elect climate science denialist and self-proclaimed "friend of coal" Larry Bucshon in April.

Steve King's closing argument is this Gateway Pundit article asserting that there was only one Freedom Party member at his meeting in Austria, along with a Jew and some gays, and the Freedom Party was forced to be Nazis by Germany and were otherwise all nice people. Nothing on 🌽

I've grown to admire @Scholten4Iowa's approach on King, which is to say "what does this have to do with Iowa, and why is the #2 agricultural district in the US represented by a man whose pet ideological projects make him too toxic to serve on the Farm Bill conference committee?"

Many longtime Republican voters in IA-4 don't appreciate how radical King has become. Telling farmers who voted for King seven times "you are a terrible person" is not a way to win their vote (though it would be a winning fundraising strategy, which is part of the problem).

(In my other threads on tech donations, commenters accused me of bias because I'm only enumerating donations to far-right Republicans. But donations to Democrats are not some kind of political anti-matter that makes it okay to give money to homophobes, racists and woman-haters.)

So the first thing to note is that Amazon is donating to Republican incumbents in some of the closest House races in the country, places where every dollar matters. Here's Amazon giving $2500 to Pete Roskam in a hotly contested Illinois race.

My plea today to all people in tech: we need to stand with our trans co-workers who are under attack. That means not letting the companies we work for pretend to champion equality while bankrolling bigoted politicians. Make them choose one or the other. nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/…

If Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Amazon, Twitter want to continue to fund conservative causes, make huge political donations to right-wing ideologues, and work to re-elect a Republican Congress that will be complicit in denying our colleagues their humanity, make them admit it

If they want to be on the side of history, humanity, equality, and decency, then they need to stop giving money to the far right. This isn't an agonizing moral choice. Apple shows how easy it is to not give campaign donations to right-wing politicians and thrive as a business

Related threads

Let me explain the former #Republican Congressman Curt Weldon whom I explained to @MuellerSheWrote that Special Counsel Mueller is now investigating as part of the #TrumpRussia probe as the author of the "back channel peace plan."

FYI: The New York Times broke the story about a secret, back-channel peace plan from Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Artemenko to Felix Sater to Michael Cohen and thereon being delivered to Gen. Flynn the NSA at the White House early in the Trump Administration

Here's what the Judd Legums of the world, in all their "investigative reporting" about #NC09, won't tell you: That there have been complaints about ballot milling in counties in that district that pre-date 2018, and even 2016. Sit back for a bit let me tell you a story. #ncpol 1/

In the fall of 2010, Wilmington-based WWAY TV station did a series on "GOTV" activities in Bladen County - the county which is in the center of the *current* #NC09 storm. Here's the link to that story, which I'll be quoting from extensively: wwaytv3.com/2010/10/01/man…#ncpol 2/

From that 2010 story: 'We received a number of calls in response to [our series] saying we never mentioned the biggest player of all in the Bladen GOTV arena. It’s called the Bladen County Improvement Association, and it’s been operating for at least 30 years.' #NC09#ncpol 3/

It was an exercise Bergen designed for teachers in a course she was leading, for schoolteachers, that was called "Teaching The Diary Of Anne Frank", to raise their awareness of the "chain of complicity" that led to the Holocaust...

Bergen wrote out, on cards she passed out one by one to the teachers, "identities" of different people who each played a part in the death of Anne Frank - Hitler, Himmler, the person who snatched a scrap of bread from Anne Frank's hand in the concentration camp...

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n 1982 Waters lent her name to a pamphlet published by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, a Communist Party USA front group that was led by Party members and supporters including Angela Davis, Charlene Mitchell, Anne Braden, and Frank Chapman.